2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

One of the primary difficulties in improving the communication experiences of students in the engineering classroom is knowing where to begin. Educators are often presented with hundreds of improvement ideas that involve varying amounts of resources, time, and ability to implement. These challenges are increased significantly when dealing with issues of gender disparity and gender maltreatment that often plague the fields of engineering and science communication. While we may have a myriad of ideas to improve the experiences of women communicating in the early engineering classroom, selecting one and implementing it can seem impossible

To help resolve these issues, this methodological paper presents a new research method called, "Infrastructural rhetorical analysis" derived from the field of rhetoric and communication. The paper then applies this method to a case study involving the experiences of women in the first-year engineering classroom, which cross-references collected institutional and infrastructural data to determine a concrete classroom intervention that will make the most difference with the least amount of resources needed to implement it.

This new "Infrastructural rhetorical" approach uses a series of rhetorically coded documents and interviews to examine the nature of communication structures in the engineering classroom. These documents and interviews are then cross-referenced against each other and against a "malleability analysis" to plan a specific classroom intervention to improve the communication practiced by students in engineering. Initial findings and results of an interventional engineering classroom case study are also provided to contextualize the application of such methods to an engineering and design course framework. Our research ultimately seeks to connect researchers in communication with practitioners in engineering education to provide new and robust methods that will strengthen the practices of both fields.